My question this morning is to the Premier of Ontario. As reported in the Hamilton Spectator, 2,100 kids are waiting for surgery at McMaster Children’s Hospital. It’s the worst wait in the province for pediatric surgery. No child should have to live in pain—pain that is entirely preventable. Imagine being a parent, watching your child live with pain and knowing that if they miss important surgeries, it can have life-altering consequences.

McMaster is doing everything they can, and the federal government has stepped in to help as well. When will your government step up and do your part to help these children?

Thank you very much for your comments today. It was very informative. I just want to get your comments on a situation in Hamilton that has just been reported on by the CBC: “Hamilton tenant says he’s being ‘eaten alive’ after living with bed bug infestation for over a year.” This tenant said “the bed bug problem in his ... apartment is affecting nearly every aspect of his life. He’s spent hundreds of dollars on laundry—washing and drying ... repeatedly, trying to get rid of the bugs.”

He’s never experienced this; it started right after he moved into his apartment in February 2022, within three weeks. He’s in touch with his landlord quite often. He emailed the landlord quite often, and they did spray, but it did not seem to be effective, so he asked them many times what they could do—could they provide him with another unit?

The day after the landlord was contacted by CBC for comment, this tenant received an N5 eviction notice. So does this bill provide these kinds of tenants any protection when their living conditions that should be—

Any thought would be nice.

Thank you the member from Ottawa Centre. You’re always bringing the fire that we need here when we’re standing up to defend people in our communities.

In Hamilton, we have right now about 1,500 people who are homeless, as the best estimates tell. We have 500 shelter beds. And we have growing renoviction applications at the LTB. People end up homeless because they lose what affordable housing that they have, and they’re losing it at an extraordinary rate.

My question to you is, why does this bill not have the teeth that it needs to protect people from being evicted from their affordable homes when we see such a crisis in all of our communities when it comes to homelessness?

It is always my pleasure to rise on behalf of the good folks of Hamilton West–Ancaster–Dundas and provide some context to the bill that’s before us today—it is the government’s Bill 97 that the government is saying is called Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants. In the time I have here today, 20 minutes, I’m going to show the many ways that this bill could actually do more to help homeowners and protect tenants than what’s presented today in this bill. As has been said by the member across, this is a national emergency. My question would be, in a national emergency, a housing emergency, a homelessness crisis, is this the bill that you want to put forward? It seems to me that it’s coming up pretty short.

Let me just talk about the context of Hamilton. I’m sure that this will be familiar to so many people in your communities, whether you want to share that or not. Hamilton is struggling with a housing affordability and homelessness crisis. Hamilton is one of the first—actually, maybe not. It’s a community that has been one of the few—I think Niagara is the other community that has declared a state of emergency over homelessness, because the municipality is struggling to keep people safe, to keep people from dying, to provide services. It was voted unanimously by city council just this past week, and they decided to declare a state of emergency related to homelessness, opioid addiction and mental health. There were many presentations, several emotional comments and pleas to the province for help during that debate. The councillor who moved it forward, Brad Clark, actually served in this House as a Conservative minister. It was Brad Clark who moved this motion.

“He spoke of overflowing shelters in the city that regularly turn individuals and families away, and of staff burnout at some of those facilities, where employees are leaving the work because they are unable to help everyone who needs it.”

Clark went on to say, “They didn’t fail, the province failed them.”

He proposed the motion because he was hoping that this would be a strong message—that Hamilton’s council is asking the province for long-term, affordable and supportive housing to help them address this humanitarian crisis.

This bill, in my opinion, does nothing to support Hamilton’s council in their struggle to provide safe and affordable housing for people. There is, in this bill, very little around municipal rent protections that could possibly now be replaced by weaker rental protections, which again, would contribute to the homelessness crisis that Hamilton is declaring. There’s just—it has been called meek action on illegal evictions, which, as I’ll talk about, are happening in Hamilton at a record pace. And really, what would a government bill be without a little side-swipe against the environment and our loss of agricultural land and sprawl? So I’m going to talk about those things in my time here.

I would just like to add that Hamilton, as best as they can track, has 1,500 homeless folks living on the streets, and to support them, there are 500 shelter beds. They’re not even coming close to being able to address the need, and I know this is true for all of our communities all across Ontario.

We’re also losing affordable housing units at a record pace. I don’t know if that’s true in other communities. But in Hamilton, last year, we lost 16,000 units of affordable housing. This bill does not really do anything to stop that bleeding of affordable housing units. The city of Hamilton has lost 29 affordable housing units for every one created. They can’t keep up with the loss of housing with affordable units that are being created.

And it’s not easy to create affordable housing, social housing. They say the cost of one social housing unit is about $450,000. I notice that the government, in their last bill, talked about $202 million for supportive housing. There are 444 municipalities in Ontario. I know it doesn’t work like this, but if you divided that, each municipality in the province, if they shared that equally, would get about $450,000. So your money that you put in to develop supportive housing equates to one unit of supportive housing all across the province. That is just not going to come anywhere close to meeting the need.

Let’s talk about renters: 30% of all voters in Ontario are renters, and in Hamilton, it has been noted—my colleague the member from Hamilton Mountain has said that the average rents in Hamilton are skyrocketing. An average one-bedroom apartment is $1,800 a month, and a two-bedroom apartment, which is what you would need if you had even the smallest family, is $2,200 a month. That’s a huge amount of money, and that has gone up, skyrocketed, under this government’s watch and under this government’s term.

So despite all of the housing bills that you’re putting forward, housing has never been more expensive—ever—in the history of the province of Ontario. Under your watch, housing and the ability to put a roof over your head have gotten more expensive, not less expensive.

One of the things that we were hoping for from a bill like this would be for there to be real, strong protections for tenants, but that is not the case. They’re not strong protections for tenants.

In Hamilton, one of the big problems that we face in trying to maintain a stock of affordable housing is renovictions and illegal evictions. I know that is something all of us have talked about. In Hamilton, the applications to evict tenants are just piling up at the Landlord and Tenant Board. Last year, it was 103 applications from landlords for renovictions—in 2019, it was 21; in 2020, there were 30; in 2021, there were 60; and last year, there were 103. What’s going on here?

Exactly.

What is going on here, that there is such a huge call for tenants to be evicted from their buildings? There must be a financial incentive. I can’t think of any other reason why landlords and property owners would seek to evict tenants at such a great rate, a large rate.

There are no real rental protections in the province of Ontario. This government, in whatever wisdom, if I can even say that, has exempted all new buildings in the province from any rent controls at all.

So you can see why there is a financial incentive—where the financial incentive would be for landlords to want to evict tenants, raise the rents, and put new people in those units. And this government has not provided strict enforcement or follow-up.

At the Landlord and Tenant Board, it has been said, it takes up to two years for anybody to get a response, despite your government increasing—which is great—the amount of money to support the Landlord and Tenant Board. It’s still not enough—because it’s not only the hearing, but it’s the tracking and the enforcement of orders, which is not mentioned anywhere in this bill that is purporting to protect tenants.

I’m just going to talk a little bit about a Hamilton tenant who is a perfect example of what could happen to any of us in how they’re being failed by this government in their ability to be protected under the Landlord and Tenant Board. There’s a tenant in Hamilton who says he’s being eaten alive after living with a bedbug infestation for over a year. And so, this tenant said that he has had a bedbug problem in his apartment that is affecting nearly every aspect of his life. He’s spending hundreds of dollars washing and drying his clothes, buying new bedding, including new beds, trying to get rid of the bedbugs. The landlord has sprayed—the landlord has done that, but it has not been effective. He continues to live with this horrible situation. He says he rarely gets a good night’s sleep without feeling the tiny pests crawl across his skin or itching the bites. I mean, this is what this young man is living with and he said he never experienced this in his life. In fact, he started experiencing it just within three weeks of moving into his new building.

Despite going back and forth with the landlord, trying to get some resolution to this horrible problem, he emailed the property owner—it’s a group, a corporation—about the bedbugs and he finally said, “You either need to book a spray or find me different accommodation because I’m getting bit daily.” And he said, “Why should I have to suffer through this?” And this is really a legitimate question to ask.

Despite his efforts to get his home rid of these bedbugs and to live in the kind of condition that everyone should expect to live in, he ended up being served with an eviction notice. The suspicion of this is that the day after the landlords were contacted by CBC for this article, he was served with an N5 eviction notice. And so, not only has this person had to live in these conditions forever, despite trying to get the landlord to help him out, he’s now facing an eviction notice.

My question is, what is going to be this tenant’s experience if he decides to fight this at the Landlord and Tenant Board? We know that it’s costly, we know that it’s difficult and we know that it’s rarely the case that the tenants are on the proper side, or on the winning side, of remedies of the Landlord and Tenant Board. And even if they are, the enforcement is not there, so people can take the time and effort to go advocate for their rights, but when they do get a judgment, there’s no follow-up, there’s no enforcement on the part of this government. And you would think that, in a bill—like, these problems are common. They’re common to all of our constituents and all of our communities. You would think that, in this bill, the government would choose to be very clear about putting in here protections and enforcement so that people are not left just at the mercy of landlords and developers, that they actually have a government that stands up for them when they most need help. This certainly is the case for this gentleman, who now is facing an eviction and facing the problem of trying to find a new affordable home for himself to live in.

Let me just say that renovictions are illegal evictions. They’re one of the biggest contributors to people being homeless and not being able to find a place to live, not being able to put a roof over their heads. The financial incentive that appears to be here for renovictions is something this government is just not addressing and is turning a blind eye to, but it’s causing real harm to people in our communities. What happens to people and families when they’re evicted or they can’t find a safe place to live? We see in all of our communities that people are dying living on the streets. They live on the streets and they are dying living on the streets.

I have a very sad story to share about a young man in Hamilton who died on our streets. He was homeless. He could not find supportive housing. He couldn’t find support for his mental health challenges. And he was living in buildings that were slated for demolition in the Westdale area. A number of times, police were called because there was a fire started; he started a fire to keep himself warm living in these buildings with no heat. Sadly, at some point, he died from the impact of being in a fire. The building caught fire and this young person died. This was a 20-year-old. In what world does a 20-year-old—a child living on the streets and dying on the streets because they don’t have a safe place to live, they don’t have a warm bed to sleep in, they don’t have somewhere to cook their meals. When you look at the pictures of where he was living, you could see that he was trying to feed himself—some of the cans of food. I mean, it’s just deplorable and it’s really nothing short of a humanitarian crisis. It’s a tragedy.

This is the ultimate failure of the system. It’s a perfect storm of failure that led to this young homeless man’s death: the failure to provide adequate housing, the failure to provide any of supports that he needed. We have an opioid crisis, we have a mental health crisis, and none of the supports are there. That’s why the municipalities are declaring states of emergency. That’s why the city of Hamilton has declared an emergency, not only to do with homelessness, but to do with an opioid and mental health crisis.

These are real stories of young people that are dying in our province, and this bill lacks any kind of the humanity, any kind of the urgency. It doesn’t seem to address what is needed when we talk about protecting tenants, when we talk about trying to provide supportive housing for people that have been evicted, that have fallen through the cracks. This government seems to think that just deregulation—taking regulations away, reducing red tape, giving tax breaks to developers—is going to solve the problem, but it’s not solving the problem. The problem is getting worse in this province. Housing starts have gone down. Rents are skyrocketing. The cost of housing is not going anywhere but up. So your plan is not working, and not only is it failing at the housing, it’s failing people actually to keep them safe and to keep them alive.

I just want to talk about the confluence of this government letting developers essentially off the hook for development charges. Development charges are what municipalities use to pay for services like supportive housing, to pay for services like mental health and addiction programs, to pay for—

Interjection: Water and sewer.

Water and sewer, exactly—to pay for the kinds of things that people need to live their lives. They pay for, really, everything. They pay for waste collection. They pay for water and sewer. They pay to fix our roads. They pay to build our schools and our parks. And now this government has let developers off the hook to the tune of—I mean, it’s been estimated that it’s about a $5-billion hole in municipalities’ coffers all across the province, and Hamilton is no exception. Hamilton, like other municipalities across the province, has had to raise taxes to compensate for this gift that you have given to developers, because in your magical thinking, you think that this is going to create housing that people can afford. People don’t want a house on the greenbelt, on a floodplain. They don’t want a house on farmland. They want an affordable house that they can live in, and they don’t want to then be saddled with a tax bill that’s tripling because you’ve given developers a free ride. Developers, like all of us, need to pay their fair share.

I’m sort of running out of time here, but let me just say that I think it’s important to note that this bill continues on the trend of this government to concentrate power in the hands of a few ministers and to shut out the democratic process. Democratically elected municipal councils are being bigfooted by this government all across this province, and Hamilton is no exception. You’ve forced Hamilton to sprawl; to grow into the greenbelt. You took 1,400 acres of greenbelt out of protections; for what? To build houses where there are no services? I have a constituent who said, “I’m not looking forward to my taxes to go up so that I can pay for the developers’ costs to build on the greenbelt when my road is falling apart,” and that’s what you’re doing here. It’s unbelievable—not to mention the loss of biodiversity, and we talked about the loss of farmland, which is about 320 acres a day that we’re losing. Your thinking is convoluted, and it’s not helping anyone in the immediate, and it’s in fact making things worse when it comes to the downloading of services that municipal taxpayers will have to pay.

So I find it really disturbing that not only are people outraged by this government’s greenbelt grab, by their lack of concern for the environment, for climate change, but we have a minister, the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, who was asked directly, would he commit to no more further encroachments on the greenbelt and on farmland? And he would not commit to that.

So I would say to communities all across Ontario, look forward to losing more of your farmland. Look forward to encroachment on green space. Look forward to—

Interjection: More flooding.

I’m going to end it there, but there are many concerns that we have with this bill. We would have expected that this would be a government that, instead of putting this weak bill forward, would have moved seriously to protect the people of the province of Ontario so that they’re not on their own when it comes to their housing costs in this province.

But you also need to be clear with people that this is not just farmers who are going to be able to subdivide agricultural land; it’s anybody who has bought agricultural land under this government who will be able to subdivide. So yes, this is going to accelerate the loss of agricultural land in this province.

Seniors should be our highest priority. We should be ensuring that they have a roof over their heads. We should be ensuring that they’re not priced out of their homes because of the increase in municipal taxes that should be labelled a Ford tax because it’s what your bills are doing: downloading the costs onto property taxpayers all across the province.

When it comes to supportive housing, in the municipality of Hamilton, there are about 10,000 people waiting for supportive housing. It’s something like a two- to five-year wait-list. People are desperate for housing, and this bill is not helping them with that.